certificate or any other of the required papers. She also seemed indifferent about it, as though other things mattered more to her. Before leaving, Mann had asked her to go with him, but first she laughed at him and then she said he was getting on her nerves and pushed him out. A few postcards arrived from him, upbeat in tone and with idyllic views of a cathedral and a river, which my aunt found in the wastepaper basket and put up in her kitchen.
The lawyer married a widow who had been at school with him and had survived the war in Holland. He moved into her flat in Amsterdam but was often in London on business. He began to bring people to Kohl's studio, and they brought other people-gallery owners, collectors, dealers- so it was often a busy scene. The visitors walked around the drawings on the walls, and Kohl turned over the large canvases for them to see; since he had only two chairs, Marta carried some in from her room, and then she stood leaning against the doorpost, smoking and watching. No one took any notice of her. They commented among themselves or turned respectfully to Kohl, who as usual had very little to say; but if Marta tried to explain something for him, he became irritated and told her to go away.
We all attended the opening of his first show at a gallery on Jermyn Street. It was packed with fashionable people, ladies with long English legs in the shiny nylons that had begun to arrive from America; the air was rich with an aroma of perfume and face powder, and of the cigars some of the men had been smoking before being asked to put them out. Marta wore an ankle-length, low-cut dress of emerald-green silk; it matched her eyes but had a stain in front that the dry cleaner had not been able to get out. She wandered around in a rather forlorn way, and no one seemed to know that she was the artists wife. Many pictures were sold, discreet little dots appearing beside them. After this show, another was held in Paris, and after a while Kohl decided to move to Zurich. The pictures still left in the house were packed up under his supervision, and again Marta stood leaning in the open door to watch, and again if she tried to say anything, he became irritated.
When he was all packed up, he came into the kitchen with a present for me. As he walked down the stairs, Marta, who seemed to be aware of his every movement, leaned over the banister and gave a street-boy whistle to attract his attention. When he looked up, she called him vile names in several languages, so that by the time he reached us, his face and ears were suffused in red. Her voice penetrated right into the kitchen, where he, always shy of anything scatological, pretended that neither he nor we could hear it. Courtly and courteous, he presented me with one of the drawings of myself-but La Plume and I didn’t even have time to thank him before Marta came whirling in. Instinctively, though not aware at that time of its value, I held my drawing close for protection.
She too was carrying a drawing; it was the one he had given her on her birthday. She held it under his nose: “Here, you ridiculous animal!” She tore it across-once, twice, three times-and threw the pieces on the floor. With a terrible cry, he crouched down to gather them up, while she tried to prevent him by stamping her high-heeled shoes on his fingers. He didn’t seem to notice when he got up that there was blood on his hands. La Plume, clasping her cheeks between her hands, showed it to him, but he was concerned only that it should not stain the pieces of drawing that he was clutching in the same way I did mine. Marta was laughing now, as at a victory-was it over the blood? Or the torn drawing? My aunt said, “Children, children,” in her usual way of trying to soothe tempers, but I did not feel that those two were children, or that there was anything childlike about their quarrel.
It was only when Marta had left us that he let go of the pieces of the drawing and laid them down on the table. “Let me see your hand,” La Plume said, but he impatiently wiped the blood off on his sleeve and concentrated on holding the drawing together. Although torn, it was still complete with nothing missing; he smiled down at it, first in relief, then in pure joy, and invited us to admire it with him-not Marta looking out of it with her insolent eyes but the work itself:
He left the next day and I never met him again. I did see the drawing again: in spite of its damaged condition some collector had bought it, and it was often reproduced in books of twentieth-century art and also appeared in a book devoted to his work. Whatever we heard of Kohl himself was mostly through the lawyer, whom my aunt had engaged to recover some family property (she never got it). We learned that Kohl had rented a large studio in Zurich, in which he both lived and worked. He allowed his dealer to bring visitors, but hardly spoke to or seemed to notice them. He never attended any of his exhibitions, nor did he give interviews to the art magazines that published articles about his work. He was always working, his only recreation an evening walk in a nearby park. He had a maidservant to cook and clean for him, a village girl fifteen or sixteen years old whom he often drew. The lawyer thought he also slept with her. Otherwise there was only his work; during his few remaining years, he grudged every moment away from it. When he died, in 1955, his obituaries gave his age as sixty-four.
Marta stayed in the house till my aunt left, and after that she took a room elsewhere. She moved often, not always voluntarily. Once or twice she landed on La Plume's doorstep, having had to vacate her room in a hurry. She never said why, but my aunt guessed that it may have been for the same reason that she herself had had to give notice to Miss Wundt.
We don’t know what she lived on. Her clothes looked thin and worn; there were buttons missing from her little jacket, and its fox-fur trimming was mangy. But she was always in a good mood and talked in her usual lively way. She heartily ate the food my aunt prepared for her-too heartily, like someone who really needed it-but she never tried to borrow money from us. Once she asked me to take her to the cinema, not for the feature film, only to see a newsreel she had been told about. When it came on, she nudged me-“Look, look, that's him! Mann!” It was a shot of an international banquet, with speeches in a language I couldn’t identify under giant portraits of leaders also unidentifiable. It may have been Mann, but many of the other delegates could have been he, big and tall and cheering loudly as they raised and then drained their glasses in toasts to the speakers at the head table. She was convinced it was Mann-“The donkey,” she laughed. “Can you imagine-he wanted to marry me. What a lucky escape,” she congratulated herself. I had to leave, but since the ticket was paid for, she stayed on to see the feature film and to wait for the newsreel to come around again.
When Kohl died, it was reported in the newspapers that he had left the pictures remaining in his possession to a museum in New York and the rest of his estate to his maidservant. The lawyer told Marta that, if she could produce her marriage certificate, she would have a strong case for challenging the will. But she had no marriage certificate any more than she had a birth certificate, nor could she remember where the marriage had been registered, or when, in fact it seemed she couldn’t remember if there had been any legal procedure at all. Whenever she spoke of Kohl, it was in the same way she did of Mann: congratulating herself on a lucky escape. She loved recalling the occasion when she had torn up his drawing-“Did you see
And then she herself disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to her. We went to ask at the last address we had for her, but the mention of her name caused the landlady to shut the door against us. Years, decades have passed, and in all this time there has been no trace of Marta. I have stopped even speculating about her, though when my aunt was still alive we often did so, and there were conclusions that we did not like to mention to each other. Marta may have been run over or collapsed in the street and been taken to a hospital and died there, with no one knowing who she was, whom to contact. She may have-who knows?- drowned herself in the Thames on some dark night, maybe tossing the red flag of her hair, congratulating herself on having fooled everyone by never learning to swim.
I no longer live in London. Some years ago, I had some money trouble that finally led me to reluctantly sell Kohl's drawing. The sum I got for it was astonishing; it not only relieved me of my difficulties but gave me a sort of private income for a few years. I felt free to go where I liked, and since I had no one else close to me after La Plume, I was free in every way. I decided to go to New York. I had heard that there was a museum with one whole room dedicated to Kohl's work, and I went there the day after my arrival. Then I could not keep away.
All his drawings were on one wall, while the paintings took up the rest of the room. The drawings were mostly of Marta, some of me, and a few of other girls my age, one of them probably his maidservant. Although there was absolutely no resemblance between any of us, what we had in common was a particular and very evanescent stage of youth; and it must have been this that elicited his little gasps of joy, his murmurs of
